The main framework of this plot has been written, and I can finally talk about it.
The prototype of the character Charlie comes from Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London". When I first read this book, I mainly wanted to find some details about poverty and hunger. After all, although my family conditions were not very good when I was a child, it was just embarrassing, not to the point of hunger and poverty. If I want to write truthfully, I need to draw nourishment from various reportage, news interviews, and biographies. Well, the remaining reference materials will be mentioned later.
While reading "Down and Out in Paris and London", I read the true story of a woman who thought she was worshipping a saint but turned out to be a prostitute and her luck actually changed and she didn't starve to death. My first reaction was, oh my god, this is so supernatural and weird, so terrifying when you think about it carefully. If this is combined with the prostitute's own problems and subsequent misfortunes, isn't it a standard secret world story
When I deliberately reproduced this plot and wrote it, most readers also had the same idea as I did that there must be something wrong with it.
This is also in line with my hope to combine real historical events with the supernatural system to achieve the writing purpose of combining truth with fantasy. This has been the case since the beginning of the mystery, but at that time, perhaps because the prototypes of the characters were mentioned in a timely manner, or because the history used was familiar to everyone, such as the Great Smog in London, no one said anything.
At first, I only took the story of worshiping prostitutes as reference material, without the idea of using it. Until I refined the settings related to the Outer Gods and looked up the etymology of Lilith, I saw a piece of information: In the legends of the Syrian region, there are seven lustful spirits, both male and female. A female was named Lilith, a male was named Lilin, and the remaining five were all names of Li+XXX. They can have sex with people in dreams, making people exhausted and tortured. After that, because of possessiveness, they will regard themselves as the wife or husband of the victim, and then harm the other half out of jealousy - the source is "The Witcher: A History of Fear" page 107. Seeing this, my thoughts are: dream sex, lust, possessiveness, jealousy... Mother tree, you still say I'm not yours!
After adding the spirit of lust and the concept of tree spirits as Sequence 5 of the Mother Tree Path, I also had inspiration on how to deal with the material of worshiping prostitutes and ideas on how to develop the subsequent plots, so I decided to use it.
I originally planned to paraphrase this material so that people wouldn't be able to tell where it came from at a glance, but then I thought that this was not right, as people would think I made it up, and wouldn't that be the same as plagiarizing someone else's life? What I need is to let people know directly where it came from. This will be a clear tribute so as not to cause misunderstanding, and secondly, it will allow readers to discover that this is actually a real historical event, which is terrifying when you think about it, and it fits in with the purpose of my writing.
Based on this idea, I tried my best to reproduce the scene of worshiping the prostitute as it is, and introduced the subsequent plot in which the wife or lover died because of the spirit of lust, and the character himself was almost killed.
My original plan was to write out the sequence to which the mother tree belonged, mention the purpose of creation in order to avoid spoilers, and then mark the source. As a result, it caused confusion for some readers.
As for Charlie being kept by a rich woman and getting the diamond necklace, it actually has nothing to do with "Down and Out in Paris and London". Although there are similar plots in it, in the end the rich woman reported the diamond necklace to the police and arrested him.
I wrote this plot to play with the popular "rich woman, hungry, food" joke, secondly, I need to give Charlie a lover, otherwise I can't draw out the jealousy of the spirit of lust, and thirdly, uh, didn't you see it? The core of this plot is essentially Maupassant's "The Necklace", which suffers for a false thing and finally discovers the irony of the falsehood. Because it is "The Necklace", I used a diamond necklace instead of other valuables to distinguish it from "Down and Out in Paris and London".
By the way, Maupassant's "Orla" in his later years really has the flavor of a mental patient's ravings. If he had not been earlier than Aislecraft, I would have suspected that he had been possessed by Cthulhu.
The name Charlie also comes from "Down and Out in Paris and London", but it's not the one who visits prostitutes, but another one. Because I like his tone, intonation and enthusiasm when speaking, so I just took his style, not the specific content or sentences. Of course, in order to make everyone see it, I also added the characteristic of short arms.
As for the poor old couple selling postcards, there are prototypes of these characters in Down and Out in Paris and London, but there is only a short line of text without enough details to satisfy my idea of writing about "old and homeless". It was not until I saw the definition of "street academic beauties" in other materials, saw the introduction of many people selling fake pornographic pictures and real postcards, and saw records of the police crackdown on photographers and underground printmakers that I decided to use this material, dig out the story behind it, and extend my personal speculations and ideas.
Many people talk about "Down and Out in Paris and London", but they may not remember what Orwell said at the end of the first part: "If anyone has the time, it would be interesting to write a biography of one of them."
Personally, I would not overestimate my abilities and really write a biography of a character from a literary classic. I am just using this shell to tell my own story and to carry more ideas.
Other things used are real details showing hunger and poverty, so I won’t go into details. By the way, regarding the detail of patting the face to create a rosy look, I originally intended to write it in correspondence with a detail in another book, so that there would be a sense of contrast and irony, but without the natural shift in character perspective that Tarot Club would bring, I had to give up with regret.
The detail is: during the Napoleon III period, a certain duke was deceived by a swindler and took arsenic-containing drugs for a long time, which led to his death. His purpose was to make his skin whiter.
This is in stark contrast to the poor people who rely on patting their faces to create a rosy look.
Well, the source should be "Impression of Paris", which talks about the emergence and development of the Impressionist school of painting. It also contains many interesting historical details of characters, which may be used later.
Also, I will probably use the prototype of a character in "Down and Out in Paris and London" later. The original text only has a short sentence, but I think there are many, many stories behind it, stories that make people sad and emotional. I will tell you which one it is after I finish writing it.
My personal habit is to directly quote original sentences or slightly modify them, and I will mark them directly at the end of the chapter. If I borrow prototypes of characters, objects, and historical events, I will mention them in the final summary of each part. Otherwise, if I really have to mark them all, some chapters may have more than ten or twenty labels.
After all, up to now, every dish and wine name, legend, city detail, magic ritual, folk culture, and local customs have their origins.
For example, Fool Yi, Paris was really full of fun people in that era.
For example, the quote about being willing to marry a death row inmate in order to get him pardoned comes from page 11 of "A History of Parisian Cafés". It also mentions a criminal who was proposed to, but because he saw that the other person was ugly, he said to the executioner, "Brother, please hang me quickly! This is a real case of a person who loves looks dying because of his love for beauty.
Well, many legends and proverbs in the first part are from the work "Montaillou", which is the product of the study of the interrogation records left by a certain pope. It truly shows the culture and life details of the village of Montaillou in southern France. The parish priest is also a character prototype taken from it, so I say that you French people are so romantic!
When I was summarizing the first part, I wanted to mention "Montaillou", but I was away from home, typing on my phone, and in a hurry, so I missed it. What I wanted to say at the time was, friends, many things in the first part are not jokes. For example, the nine oxen pulling the coffin is really not a joke about Dong Ge's nine dragons pulling the coffin. That is a real historical legend of the Montaillou area, and human imagination is sometimes a bit similar.
Finally, here are some references:
Montaillou
"The Golden Bough", "Down and Out in Paris and London", "Impressions of Paris", "The Wizard: A History of Fear", "History of Parisian Cafés", "Les Miserables", Balzac's "The Peasants", "Old Goriot", "Orla", "The Monarch and the Contractor", "A History of France in Desserts", "The Masses in the French Revolution", "From Dawn to Decline: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present", "The French People: A History of Four Periods and Five Regions", "A French Food Tour", "Catacombs: An Underground History of Paris", "Americans in Paris", "A History of the French Workers' Movement", "The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune", "A History of France in French Desserts", "Paris, the Capital of the 19th Century", "Underground Literature of the Old Regime in France", "The Shocking Workers' Movement in Victorian France ...The History of France in French Desserts", "Paris, the Capital of the 19th Century", "Underground Literature of the Old Regime in France", "The Shocking Workers' Movement in Paris", "The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune", "The History of France in French Desserts", "Paris, the Capital of the 19th Century", "Underground Literature of the Old Regime in France", "A Horror Story", "The Paris Commune: The World's First Proletarian Regime", "How Much Money Was Worth in the Past", "The Workers' Uprising in Lyon, France", "Paris, London and New York and the Imagination of Urban Population in the Nineteenth Century", "History of Rural France", "History of French Literary Contempt", "Women Who Light Up Paris", "Wicca Magic", "Guide to Western Mysticism", "The Complete Tarot Book", "When Occultism Comes Knocking", "The Inner Sky", "The Golden Dawn", "Systematic Theology", "Witches in the Middle Ages", "How to Correctly Read a Medieval Cookbook", "Architecture in the Victorian and Edwardian Periods", "Hemingway's Paris", "People at the Bottom", "Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe". If I don't mention it deliberately afterwards, the sources should all be in the above books, haha.
Finally, since I have published a single chapter, how can I not ask for monthly tickets and subscriptions
Please subscribe and give me monthly votes!