Week 13: Famous Last Words

So......... I am done with my Brer Rabbit Storybook, and I am really happy how it has turned out. Plus it means I am almost done with this class; just a few little posts (10 points) over the next few weeks... all the heavy lifting is done.

Here's the "image row" that shows all four stories:

Writing the final story was easier than I thought: it had a very nice structure to follow, with the set-up, the first part of wolf's speech to the animals, the second part of his wolf's speech, and then the conclusion. With the plot all laid out like that, all I had to do was tell what happened and write the dialogue. It even came out right at 1000 words without any difficulty at all (Harris's original was also around 1000 words too). I was also really happy with Mammy-Bammy getting the wolf skin in the end; that tied in with Taily-Po and also with other witch lore and wolf lore too.

If I do write a Brer Rabbit book this summer, I am thinking this might be a good way to do it, finding three or four or five stories that fit together in a kind of group like this, so that the whole book would consist of maybe a dozen or so groups like that, so that the stories inside each group are connected in some way, but not worrying too much about the connections from one group and another. If I were to add one more story to this group, it would be the one about Brer Rabbit and Aunt Nancy (Anansi), with Nancy being the even scarier version of Mammy-Bammy: Brother Rabbit Doesn't Go to See Aunt Nancy.

This is the Storybook that I had planned out in the most detail from the start, and the plan worked out really well. It was maybe less exciting because I was not getting that thrill of surprises like I did with the Hanuman project last time, where I didn't figure out even until the very end that Pirakuan was going to be Hanuman's mother (Hanuman's Victory). But having this all planned out meant that I was able to make really good use of the research options for the Story Lab, doing lots of research so that I felt really confident when I went to work on each story.

And working on the Nasruddin project for NaNoWriMo has really convinced me that I can just set aside this sense of obligation to be doing scholarly work. It's hard to get rid of that feeling, since it's what I am supposedly trained for... but what these stories really need is to be told in ways that will be fun for people to read. What's the point of doing scholarly work on stories that have died? I'd rather have a chance to work on keeping the stories alive than writing commentaries on them after their demise.

So, I'm not sure what's ahead in the coming year (I wish my life were not so full of uncertainty, though that's just the way it is right now with my dad...), but somehow or other there will be a book: Nasruddin might turn into a book, or that book for Johns Hopkins (but the longer I wait to hear back from the editor, the more dubious that seems), and I am already excited to do NaNoWriMo again next fall with who-knows-what as my topic. Maybe that will be a time for Brer Rabbit to rise again! :-)