Anaïs Nin and Colette on YouTube

A couple of friends came over and videoed me reading aloud from my novel, Nights in Paris. One video shows me reading from The Slave of Bracelets, one of my chapters about Anaïs Nin. In the other video, I read from The Silver Stopper, one of my chapters about Colette.

Not having any acting or filming experience, being filmed was bizarre and excruciatingly embarassing. However, everyone seems to be Tubing these days, and when in Rome, etc.

In the Colette video, I introduce myself in French as well as English. My French is pretty good, but I was so nervous that my pronunciation of “roman” (“novel” — a very easy word to say) wobbled and came out as “romain” instead. I had exactly the same wobble on the next take, which was otherwise okay, so we decided to let it go. So that’s why I’m describing my Roman instead of my novel!

I’m going to attempt to give you the links to my videos, but I find links tricky, so if they don’t work, please search YouTube for my name, Sarah Line Letellier, and the videos should pop up.

Extract from The Slave of Bracelets (about Anaïs)

Extract from The Silver Stopper (about Colette)

Big thanks to Nicola, my web guru, and to Elaine, filmographer extraordinaire! S x

A Café in Space

Paul posted this lovely comment recently. It’s in response to one of my posts about Anaïs Nin from last year. So that you can read it, here is Paul’s comment again:

From Paul: Hi Sarah, noticed your blog. I publish some of Nin’s work and have a Nin blog at http://www.skybluepress.com/blog.html. Come visit some time, and best of luck! Paul Herron – http://www.skybluepress.com

Hi Paul, thank you so much. I had a look at your website – it’s wonderful! I look forward to ordering a copy of A CAFÉ IN SPACE: THE ANAÏS NIN LITERARY JOURNAL very soon, and maybe, if I’m feeling brave, submitting my Anaïs story… we shall see! Thanks again for visiting. All the best, Sarah

A Café in Space is a wonderful site featuring six literary journals, all focusing on Anaïs Nin, available to order. There’s also an “Anaïs Nin Character Dictionary and Index to Diary Excerpts” by Benjamin Franklin V. When you think how prolific Anaïs Nin was, and how many versions of each volume of each diary she wrote, compiling an index and dictionary of her journals is an incredible feat. It’s a marathon achievement of pure scholarship (in the original, selfless meaning of the word) and poetic, heroic devotion.

Anaïs Nin narrated by Marlene!

A big thank you to Nicola the web goddess! She’s fixed up my blog with a sparkling new template, added great new features, and found the most wonderful, sensuous video as a wonderful treat for everyone who reads this blog! Marlene Dietrich’s husky, sultry voice is an ideal accompaniment to these 1930s style photographs inspired by Anaïs Nin’s erotic writing; if I were to guess which specific story of erotica, I would say Elena from Delta of Venus. (Yes, I am a devotee!) I love this video because it is the visual image of my writing. It is a perfect translation of the atmosphere I am creating in my Colette and Anaïs novel, Nights in Paris.

Un grand merci à Nicola, qui a trouvé ce petit film, vraiment extraordinaire, sur Anaïs Nin. Ultra sensual et vraiment très beau, ce film est exactement l’atmosphere que je suis en train de créer avec mon roman sur Colette et Anaïs, Paris dans la Nuit.

A busy month for writing competitions

Actually, it’s the last two months that have been madly busy: just call me whirling chaos. There’s the Six Pack competition (NZ), the PSA competition (NZ), the Fish one page competition (Ireland), and an application for Creative NZ funding… and the writing of these stories (all different) to be fitted in around an equally busy time at work — no wonder there’s been no time to even think about the leaking roof! It can be quite melodious sitting on the loo, as the rain drips in two places very slightly out of time, so you get a dancing two-step plink-plonk, plink-plonk effect.

Meanwhile, chez Anaïs… I have a beautiful new picture of her on my inspiration board, wearing the transparent, black lace dress made famous in the film “Henry and June”. All that’s missing is the portrait of Colette and Missy, Colette at her desk, pen poised, the desk covered in papers, books and Toby-chien the miniature bulldog, while Missy standing at the window, looking like a serious, protective uncle. I haven’t written much of the Anaïs chapters lately, as I’m concentrating on Colette for the moment, but she’s still there in the background: the story is fermenting, gathering flavour and spices…

What I’ve been reading lately: “Extremely loud and incredibly close” by Jonathan Safran Foer. A friend lent it to me, and to be honest I opened the book a bit resentfully, or rather with bad grace, not expecting to enjoy it. I was mesmerised from the first paragraph, or maybe even the first sentence. I won’t spoil it by saying what it’s about: just read it, it’s brilliant.
I’m also simultaneously rereading Colette “Claudine married” (for research purposes), and comics by Roberta Gregory and Alison Bechdel (purely for fun). Also a fictional biography of Anaïs Nin — I won’t say who it’s by as I think my stories are much better!

Tout ce qu’il me manque pour mon mur d’inspiration, c’est le portrait de Colette et Missy, Colette assise à son bureau, un stylo à la main. Le bureau est un bazar de papiers, de livres, le tout surveillé par Toby-chien et Missy, debout à la fenêtre avec son air d’oncle plutôt sérieux.

J’ai une idée: je pense à traduire, dans chaque poste, un petit extrait de mon roman en français. Qu’est-ce que vous en pensez?

aristocratic intoxicants

I’m adapting the Colette chapter for a short story competition, and I was stuck on the twist — I don’t mean the twist in a Roald Dahl kind of way, I suppose I mean the point of it. A story has to have a point: what is it trying to say? What WAS I trying to say? I had the same problem with my story “The Slave of Bracelets”: June gives Anais the bracelet. And then what? Something definitely had to happen with the bracelet, but what? I didn’t have the title yet, so it was all a bit more up in the air. It took me a while of thinking, fermenting, agitating and vacuuming (it’s a great sedative) before it came to me: June takes it back. The ending was blindingly obvious once I had it, but until then I had no idea what on earth could happen with that sodding bracelet.

Incidentally, the real bracelet in question had a cat’s-eye stone in it, but in my story I’ve changed it to a tiger’s eye. When I started writing these stories, I wanted to be very strict about being faithful to the biographical and historical facts. But I needed a stone that would catch the light and be mesmerising, and also suggest June’s exotic magnificence, and cat’s-eye stones just don’t inspire me. There was no way I could write about this cat’s-eye and how fascinating it was. When I write I see objects and characters in my mind, and whenever I looked at the bracelet I felt bored. I decided to take some writerly liberties, as after all, I am not writing biographies (neither of them need any more of those to be written about them) and I felt it was more important to get the story, as fiction, right. There are a couple of other things, for example Anais’s dog in the story is a lapdog rather than the policedog she actually had, but that may change, depending on what kind of personality I need the dog to have later!

So…. here I was again with the same problem. I have Colette, Willy and Missy: a scandalous, melodramatic threesome (foursome, if you count Meg, but she’s not in my story, although that may change) that went on for years. In my story, Colette meets Missy and they get together for the first time. But what was the point? It didn’t seem enough. And then I remembered that one of the Claudine novels (Claudine and Annie) has a subplot about Annie’s addiction to ether, and I remembered other novels where Colette writes about going to an opium den (just for the experience) and about morphine addicts. Willy wrote articles accusing Missy of being a morphine addict — Willy and Colette had very public domestic arguments that were published as letters in the press.

I realised that I could ‘grow’ this theme. I haven’t been able to find much about fashionable drugs in the 1900-1910 period, but I did find much more about laudanum (morphine dissolved — I’m sure that’s not the technical term! — in alcohol, mixed with sugar) than I did about ether. This makes me wonder if ether was used all that much, but it’s definitely what Colette refers to (inhaling rather than drinking) so after alot of angst and wondering if I should change the drug to laudanum, I’ve decided to leave it as ether. I think — I may be wrong — that laudanum was more of a working-class drug as it was so common (must have been cheap), in which case ether is right. And I have some morphine in there too, just for variety. It’s wonderful and fascinating how freely people were able to intoxicate themselves!

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