14
Apr
2009
Getting back on the horse…
14
Apr
2009
Having been laid off has been something of a curious mix for me. My day so far has evolved into something like this: Get up around 6:30. Get the kids out the door by 8. From 8:30 am to 10:00 am I do the serious job searching: I answer emails, look up job listing, contact recruiters, send out resumes and deal. I take a break from 10:00 to about 10:30, and then work more on the job search until noon. Omaha and I usually break for lunch together. In the afternoon, I do another 90 minutes of work, this time on my portfolio projects, and then another break, then another 90 minutes.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t leave much time for writing. Even without the commute, because I’m home I have to deal with the kids when they leave and get back: packing lunches, getting dressed, and then homework and extracurricular activities.
But I did find time to write this evening, and did about a thousand words. It’s a centaur/centaur scene between two of my green-furred foxtaurs, one of whom has revealed a terrible secret (”We’re not the same species anymore”), and the other of whom is about to reveal, not so much a secret as a terrible cultural defect.
If only I didn’t hear Shatner’s voice every time the male lead opened his mouth. But it’s nice to be writing again.
12
Apr
2009
Thinking about magic systems…
12
Apr
2009
While at NorWesCon, I attended a panel on magic systems and how to get them right. While I was listening to the panel, it occurred to me that in my WIPs right now, I’m tinkering with four separate magic systems.
The Yowlerverse
The Yowlerverse is probably the best-thought-out of the systems, and the most destructive of them. To understand it, though, you have to understand Aristotle’s principle of mediocrity: Aristotle believed that, at its fundamental level, reality was the same everywhere. The laws of truth that applied to us applied likewise to the stars and even to the gods themselves. But mediocrity is only true at a fundamental level. It isn’t true that the universe as a uniform 3C, except to a first approximation: within stars, and even here on Earth, the temperature is thankfully a bit higher.
In this reality, a few thousand light years from where you’re sitting, a few thousand years ago, a star exploded. Everywhere within 30 light years of that supernova, its effects can be seen. Space has been swept clean. There’s a “gap” in the Milky Way. (My learning of this led to the Great Kinnunga Gap in The Journal Entries, an area of space 2000 ly across that separates The Corridor from Sterling space.)
In the Yowlerverse, the universe takes the well-known Observer Phenomenon of quantum physics to an absurd degree: the sufficient will of a sufficiently conscious creature is enough to change material reality itself in drastic ways. This nicely solves The Drake Equation: there aren’t any aliens because they quite effectively wreck their ecosystems the second they evolve to the point where they start to think conscious thoughts.
But Earth is “different.” A few billion years ago something happened to create a supernova gap, but this “gap” is one where that fundamental truth of the universe is suppressed. Either something has been “swept out” of our space, or something has “blown through” this space, that has suppressed the will-to-power phenomenon, sufficient to allow conscious thought to emerge. Sometimes this suppression fails: famous periods in time when this happen include the early Greek mythological period (especially when Egypt still had pharaohs, as that created the Bastet), the mid-Roman Republic and Imperium, and a brief few months in late 1898. Oh, and the extinction of the dinosaurs? Totally a return-of-magic incident. Natural philosophers are terrified of the day this effect fails completely, because we’re all doomed.
Moon, Sun, Dragons
In contrast to the Yowlerverse, Moon, Sun, Dragons (I discovered another series with a similar name, and am tempted to rename this The Carriers of Night) has a completely naturalistic universe. It just happens to seem magical. This is mostly a case of nanotech as Applied Phlebotinum, the seeds of the evil space dragon’s destruction having traveled with the dragons from one star system to another, but the seeds require conscious direction and its hoped the humans can supply it. The problem is that the humans are all so limited in their understanding, this being the 16th century after all, that they apply the “magic” badly, and so we get the three classes of mage: swords, arrows, and seers. This isn’t a limitation of the nanochine that’s now infesting most of the Earth; it’s a limitation of the imaginations of the humans themselves.
In the second Carriers of the Night series, Janae, humans have figured out a few more tricks, including a form of pseudo-prescience that’s very useful on the battlefield, but still nothing outside the capabilities of ordinary human beings to cogitate about.
Aimee
The Aimee universe is all high magic, the kind of thing found in Harry Potter and Lynn Flewelling’s book. It’s mostly “whatever I can convince the reader I can get away with” sort of thing, with lots of silly ideas mostly ripped out of Rolemaster, which I always thought was a higher class of game than D&D.
The Reef
Technically, The Reef is a magic universe. It’s just that humans can’t do magic. But lots of other, very nasty, things, can. Since humans have no grip on the magical system of the universe, I don’t have to explain it. I just have to understand it myself sufficient to convince the reader that Ms. Kensington and her crew can battle it and perhaps survive.
9
Apr
2009
What the Hell?
9
Apr
2009
For the record, I have no idea who this guy is. I just happened to be wandering around the ‘net (yeah, okay, sorta ego-surfing, sorta looking for copyright violators) and came across this. It’s fairly passable amateur electronica with some heavy classical and Latin típica influences, and I think I’ll put it on my iPod just for fun.
24
Mar
2009
“Murder your darlings…”
24
Mar
2009
One of the most common phrases you hear early in any writing career is “Murder your darlings.” What it means is that you must learn to ruthlessly cull any scene from your story that doesn’t serve the story, no matter how much you love that scene, no matter that it’s the one scene in the whole book that made you cackle with glee and rub your hands in anticipation of the reader’s reaction. If it doesn’t make the whole of the story work, throw it overboard.
I murdered one of my true darlings last night. It was real brain crack. I’ve had this image in my head for ages, even wrote it down and had it out as best I could. It was a lovely scene, all full of royal teenage swearing and cursing at the excessively helpful AI who overcame all her careful outrage and upset and depression and just wouldn’t let her kill herself, dammit, not even in a fall from orbit. Many of my stories contain homages, and this was supposed to be another Masamune Shirow homage: one of the cliche’s of which he’s fond is that everything he writes always seems to feature a beautiful woman jumping off a building: Duenan jumps out of Athena tower in the Appleseed remake, echoing the suicide that opens the original; Motoko can’t pass by an episode of Stand Alone Complex without falling off a building somewhere, and even opened Ghost in the Shell with a fall-off-a-building scene.
Sadly, the scene has disappeared from Fallen Angel. The story of Fallen Angel is one that’s been percolating in my head for years and years, and the idea is simple: in a slower-than-light universe, in a sphere no more than 30 or 40 light-years across, with no contra-physics phenomena, two groups live more or less intermingled, both brought by the same starship thousands of years ago. The first group, the settlers, are living an almost idyllic, arcadian lifestyle. (A close read of the village in the middle of the book will reveal an obvious relationship to another famous pastoral village in literature.) The second group, the crew, have headed off and become part of their starships, living among their machines. These two “empires” are embedded in one another, one using stars bright enough to support Terran-style worlds, the other living among the brown dwarfs and interstellar debris, of which there is much in the neighborhood. After two thousand years of increasingly ruthless experimentation, the Empire of the Crew have made their breakthrough and achieved substrate independence: they can now upload their own consciousnesses into their computers directly, and there’s no need for them to keep around the heavy, wet-filled nanotech life support system they call The Living Water.
The scene I wrote is the one where Princess Heiderome decides she doesn’t want to be in this suffocating, unchanging place anymore, that the routine and obvious brutality of her place have made her crazy and depressed, and she tries to off herself in dramatic fashion, burning up in the atmosphere style, but her EVA suit is too smart for her and saves her.
I’ve had to ditch it in favor of a better scene, ten years after the fact, her adoptive father is telling her re-entry moment from his point of view, and he’s telling it to someone “of the gods.” The scene involves a lot more detail, allows us to get her reaction now that she’s older and, better yet, allows me to re-write her motives. She was much younger when the incident occurred, too young in fact to have made the decision herself. This gives me a conspiracy within the Crew, plus I came up with a reason why she was tossed into an interstellar-capable emergency shell, and even better, when she goes to sleep voices whisper to her. Voices, many many voices, that are afraid of “the gods,” but also afraid of the Crew, should they be discovered. These voices tell her truths she would rather not know, but they are her friends and her comforters.
Far off in space, the ships of the Empire are coming.
There are several working conflicts within the book now, thanks to my deleting the original scene. Heidi is a much more interesting character at fifteen than she was earlier, and although she’s kept the nanotech-added advantages of her birthright– much stronger, a bit tougher, more perceptive, but no faster and unfortunately unable to swim– she’ll be forced to decide which life she wants. The voices she hears are from an entire virch she carries within her, the first successful uploading. Only the people of the virch don’t see it as successful. They have an agenda. The starship coming to her world is looking for her, but doesn’t know which world she’s on. And it’s looking for the virch, but doesn’t know she has it. And people on that ship have an agenda.
And maybe the gods have an agenda of their own.
Huh. I just realized. This might be construed as something of a Superman retelling, with the voices in Heidi’s head a 21st-century version of the Bottle City of Kandor. I don’t know anything about the Superman legend really– didn’t like the movies much and wasn’t a Supes fan, and what little I know about Kandor comes from some descriptions of it in episodes of Legion of Superheroes (which I was a fan of, no surprises there). I’ve never watched Smallville (sp?) either.
Anyway, the falling-from-space scene is gone from Fallen Angel, which is okay: I’ve worked it into an episode of Caprice Starr instead, I think. Can anyone think of a good reason why a space shuttle might be carrying a lot of weather balloons?
Eagle over Lake Quinalt
I would like to say that my time at the Quinalt Rainforest Writer’s Retreat for 2009 resolved some questions for me about my writing habit obsession hobby career whatever one way or another, but unfortunately that didn’t happen. What I did learn is that the secret to productivity is to Turn Off The Goddamn Internet And Go Someplace Quiet. I had very slow wifi web-only (no email, no usenet, no last.fm, and no video feeds) access for five hours or so every day when the bar was open, and there was always a writer’s alley in the tables along the bay-window walkway that looked out over Lake Quinalt, but the most productive sessions, the ones that produced 1000 words an hour or more, were when I locked myself in my hotel room and just wrote. While in the bar with the other writers, my word count dove to 300 words per hour.
I kinda like the Cult of Done, but I also have to face two uncomfortable facts. First, my ADHD, spurred by my constant need to be in interrupt mode when home with the kids, makes it hard to concentrate on anything for a week, and second, my best stories, the ones that have sold, have all been re-writes. Not “I agonized over this and re-wrote it five times looking for the story before I found it” re-writes, but the “I loved this story the first time I wrote it, and, upon re-writing, discovered a much better story, a story good enough that I convinced myself writing is worth the effort.”
Re-writing is so much harder than writing. It involves tracking and retracking, putting the plot up on the board and decididng what to keep and what to throw away, killing moments you cackled over the first time but that don’t contribute to the plot, theme, and characters you’ve come to love. Re-writing has no metric. There’s no word-count in a re-write. My re-written stories are always smaller than the originals.
My final word count for the weekend was 12,646 words, scattered through four Journal Entries, some Caprice Starr work, a Yowler short, and so on. My problem remains the same: I need to concentrate on one story long enough to get to done on it. And for that, I need to remind myself of why I love writing in the first place. The love is still there, but the reasons for that love seem to escape me these days.
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