That damn king and his damn infinite space

So

I am feeling quite scatterbrained. Sorry about the messed-upness of this post.

Anyway. In case you don't know, I'm currently plotting my next ms, The King of Infinite Space. It's a Hamlet rewrite, placing Hamlet and his issues in high school.

Okay. So. If you've read the play, you know that our buddy Hamlet himself isn't present for a lot of the major scenes. I could place him in some without it feeling contrived, but others just plain wouldn't work. Some important stuff needs to happen when he's not there, and the audience needs to know about it.

So. Here are my choices, basically:

1. Do a 3rd person limited with my buddy Hamlet. Include notes/letters/emails/text messages between other charcters, conveying information.

2. Do a rotating 3rd person limited through Hamlet, Laertes, Claudius, and probably Horatio. I'm not a fan of this one.

3. Do omniscient.

Uhhhh I'm super afraid of omniscient. Do you guys think I can handle it? And you do think I can show enough of Hamlet's inner turmoil/religious crisises/general angst in an omni pov?

This doesn't feel like a 1st person kinda book, so I didn't even include that.

Thoughts?

Thanks so much, Stew. Since you share my (obsessive) love for Hamlet, your opinion means lots to me.

I TOTALLY considered doing Horatio's POV, because of the whole "Tell my story" thing at the end (and because I love Great Gatsby so much....) Thing is, I love the tell-from-a-secondary-character technique. And I always do it. So I wanted to switch it up a little.

I like the idea of Hamlet finding the emails, though...especially for the letter-to-England-Rosencrantz-Guildenstern thing.

(By the way, he's not going to die at the end...I've got this whole "school is a metaphor for life" thing. So he's expelled, just like daddy and Claudius and Claudius were fired, Laertes is expelled, Ophelia drops out, leaving Horatio at the top of the class and Fortenbras to get the scholarship...)

It's all quite epic.

Ahhh, I know, I'm so torn. He's not around for that much, though, is the problem, and I really feel a need to be inside Hamlet's head on this one. Either we have to be in his head or he has to talk, a LOT....hmmm. I could just have him think out loud, like, incessently. More than one would normally expect.

Hmm......now I'm getting into it.


(I'm really excited about my Ophelia thing. She's going to get pregnant, freak out, and have a maybe-abortion-maybe-miscarriage and drop out of school. Hamlet (and Horatio) find the janitors cleaning out her locker, and he fights Laretes, who isn't so happy with Hamlet for knocking up his sister--in front of her locker. Mwahaha.)

And this is after he gets biology teacher Polonius fired when he finds him experimenting on his rats.

hokay so I'm leaning towards Horatio. And thank you very much, Miss Jordan. I guess you can see why I'm so excited about this one??

Yeah, I can kind of picture Horatio on the phone with Hamlet, and he won't...stop....talking.

Thoooough Horatio doesn't have much of a backstory, so I'd have to slap some actual personality on that guy.

Chicken Warrior said:

Aha, Jordon took the words right out of my mouth and made them make sense.

If you want different, try omniscient. If not, it sounds like Horatio would rock. Having said that, I haven't studied Hamlet in depth (afraid it's not my favorite shakespeare at all, but maybe I just need to try it again).

Click to expand...

Ooh, what's your favorite?

See, I've only read Hamlet and about half of Julius Caesar. So.

Yeah at this point I think I'm going to try Horatio. I think I could rock it. After all, I do have practice.

Thanks for the help, guys.

Sage said:

Sorry, I came in late, but I like the idea of using Horatio's POV too. On top of Hamlet talking to him on the phone, you can also have fun text messages from Hamlet. Horatio's comes out of class & turns on his phone to find five crazy-sounding text messages from Hamlet

Click to expand...

I LOVE THAT.

Plus the first line is a text message: whos there

Haha, you're a sweetie, chicken.

OK, in case anyone's interested....here's the first bit. HORATIO'S POV.

whos there

The text message flew off my fingers. Screw tact. Screw subtlety. I was going to find out who this creep was, and I was going to find out now.

The February air stung my ears. Close the damn door. I inched my foot out from between the front door and its frame. The latch clicked shut, leaving me alone with my creep, the orange tiles, and glaring metal lockers.

Great.

On my phone, the yellow envelope soured into the pixeled mailbox. SENT.

Yeah. But sent to who?

I waited a few fruitless minutes for a response. Of course I got nothing. It was almost eight, and whoever this guy was, he only texted me between midnight and four in the morning.

And always the same thing. My best friend’s name, over and over and over.

Which would have been disconcerting enough even if my best friend wasn’t on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

And even if I hadn’t been getting this weird feeling that--

“Hector?”

That I was being frickin watched.

Polkins stalked towards me, his white coat flying behind him like a cape. “You’re supposed to be at assembly.”

Polkins was the master of the split personality. In school, he was Doctor, the biology master, the teacher who would kick your ass ten times to Tuesday. And then, bang, the bell rang, and he was Coach, the macK truck who used his lacrosse stick as a weapon.

He raised his eyebrows. “Cell phone?”

I shoved it in my pocket. “Yeah,” he said, chuckling. “That’s what I thought. Come on. Mr. Clyde’s orating.”

This filled my head with unnecessary images of our new principal. I trailed behind Polkins down the hall to the theater. The silver quality of Clyde’s voice drew closer and closer.

Polkins pushed open the doors and ushered me inside, into the rows of seats stuffed with my classmates, all of them straight-backed robots in their navy blazers and khakis, staring up at Clyde on the stage.

“Sit down,” Polkins hissed, and slipped into a seat in the back.

I scanned the masses. My eyes fell on Hale crashed alone in the very back row, his blazer a crumpled mess on the floor, white shirtsleeves pushed up to his elbows, feet on the chair in front of him. He studied his cuticles like they were the ones giving the speech, and he didn’t approve of their diction.

Enter my cursed old best friend.

I slid into his row and into the seat beside him. The red plush cushed under my weight. “Hey.”

He groaned in the back of his throat. “God, I’m glad to see you. This is a prison.”

The hyperbolistic bastard. I raised my chin to see the stage. Hale’s uncle stood at the podium, smiling, his blue suit perfect. “If this is a prison, than everything’s a prison.”

He scowled. “School’s a prison.”







That's a reference to "Denmark's a prison," of course.

So uh...what do you guys think so far?

Jordan--I love you to death!!

Thanks so much, Stew and Chicken and Ana...you guys are awesome. Don't have any more yet....yeah, I'm pretty sure I meant soared there...that word ALWAYS trips me up.

And yeah, I'm breaking the first rule of NaNo.


I LOVE the idea of Hamlet being a blogger, and I'm totally stealing it.

Yeah, I basically hate the opening paragraph. It'll get cleaned up. I have to think of a good way to have it start with the "whos there."